Most of the major players are already committed to participating at CloudOpen: Canonical, Citrix, Dell, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel, OpenStack, Red Hat and SUSE. From the press release: “Designed for software developers and IT managers responsible for deploying and developing cloud solutions, CloudOpen will feature technical content that includes … big data strategies and open cloud platforms and tools. This conference will also cover open source best practices and how they relate to topics such as company data and APIs.”

This is what the Linux Foundation does best: provide a vendor-neutral common ground for collaboration on advancing the state of the art in Linux and open source technologies. “This conference is built on one belief: open works,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services at The Linux Foundation. “We know this from experience and know that the cloud demands it in order to be successful for the long term.”

My first question upon hearing about CloudOpen was: what took you guys so long? “We are getting to the point now that real decisions are being made by customers and vendors,” McPherson told me. “We feel now is the best time for us to provide this neutral forum and also advance the conversation.” She told me that the Linux Foundation evaluates three questions when they see an opportunity to serve the Linux community:

Is it being done by someone else?

Are we uniquely suited to provide the service?

Do we have the resources or can we easily obtain the resources to support it?

The press release seems to focus on companies and projects offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) solutions, so I was curious if the Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) crowd was invited to the discussion. “Both are absolutely invited. We expect vendors representing both offerings to participate,” McPherson confirmed. She went further to say that CloudOpen wasn’t exclusive to Linux Foundation members, but that “it’s definitely open to others and we expect many non members to be involved.”

CloudOpen is taking place August 29-31, concurrently with LinuxCon North America in lovely San Diego, Calif. The early bird price to register for CloudOpen is $400, and gives you full access to all of the LinuxCon North America event, as well. Compared to other Linux and open source conferences, that’s a very reasonable price.

I expect to cover LinuxCon North America, and I’m really looking forward to the CloudOpen conversations.

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